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“Oh Snap”, courtesy of Adam Lisagor
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➶ Google: The Next 6 Months of Android Will "Blow Your Mind"
Gizmodo interviews Andy Rubin, father of Android. It’s an interesting read, however some of his answer continue to baffle me:
Gizmodo: But if you’re not running 2.1, for instance, you can’t get the official Twitter app.
Andy: I mean there are apps written for Vista, just like Photoshop CS5 does not run on Windows 3.1
Adobe Photoshop CS5 shipped earlier this month, and will run on Windows XP, Vista or Seven. Windows 3.1 was released in March 1992. Twitter for Android shipped in April this year whilst any non-upgradeable handset sold prior to January this year is tough out of luck if it wants to run the official Twitter client. Hardly a fitting analogy.
Gizmodo: So how does the update process go? How do you decide what goes into each release?
Andy: It’s pretty random. We roadmap one release out, so we don’t plan out the year, or two years or five years like a lot of other people do.
Translation: we look at what features we think we can out-do Apple with, throw in a few features that Apple are “only” just announcing, and present them in a smug - almost painfully so - presentation.
Looking back at the video I’ve seen of the Froyo launch, it’s clear that Google is ahead of Apple in some regards. But the pitching of Froyo - to the main Android audience - was bizarre. Some of the announcements - particularly that of tethering - were clearly going to spread like wildfire amongst suitably excitable developers without any caution that the carriers can either not enable the service, or charge through the roof for the privilege. At least Apple’s announcement considered the excitement of tethering support, and tempered it with a list of carriers.
Before the inevitable tirade of iPhone fanboy-ism arrives, let me say this: competition is good. Competition for the iPhone makes my next iPhone better, and I welcome any innovation that makes Apple react.
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A bigger feature list does not constitute leap-frogging, no matter how much bravado you project in your terrible commercials. Any idiot can throw features into a box and call it better. Actually producing something useful is significantly harder.
Mike Lee on the recent Android hysteria. Be sure to read it all. -
➶ Why I went back to the iPhone from the HTC Desire
Fascinating piece on the current-favourite Android hardware. With that in mind, this observation makes an absolute joke out of the cheap jabs Google made at the absent-until-4.0 iPhone background tasking in today’s Android keynote:
Auto memory management is poor at best. The OS can start closing apps (like the actual Sense UI) that you need, whilst keeping apps (like Footprints) running.
Sense UI is the custom Android UI system that HTC ships with the Desire.
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➶ Gizmodo's gushing coverage of today's I/O keynote
First there’s the gushingly sycophantic piece about Microsoft Windows Phone 7 back in February, and now this. It’s as though it’s written by Google PR, and painful to read.
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Here’s what’s wrong with Google Buzz
Editorial Note: There’s bigger problems in the world than the brouhaha surrounding Google Buzz. However, in a day and age where we’re being encouraged to be wary of what we share online, Google’s reckless miss-steps and decisions with Buzz are concerning. This article contains strong language.
I’ll be blunt and say it: I’m totally unhappy with Google Buzz. For a product built by no-doubt very smart people, it lacks any realism or understanding of the social context it’s being forced into. Buzz is clearly a product built and designed by engineers. People who are no doubt very smart, and grok the usefulness of location-awareness. However the biggest problem is that they don’t understand the mainstream hesitance around sharing location data with people - and above all sharing it with Google. There’s no reassurance as to why you’re sharing your location, to what accuracy, and - incredibly - there’s no approval of who you’re actually sharing the data with because, to cap it all off, the same brilliant engineers decided that the best system to add social networking to was the most private and deliberately NON-public system known to man: email.
Because, naturally, an entirely private and confidential method of communication is absolutely the best way to determine who the fuck I’d actually want listed as “Friends” in a social network profile. Like hell it is.
Google: I want out of Buzz. I’ve been a 6-year Gmail veteran. I’ve put up with you automatically adding everyone I email to my Google Address Book [which was also entirely stupid]. But for you to then decide that my email address book should be the basis of a publicly-viewable social network account is bat-shit-crazy-bordering-on-irresponsible.
Update: Some have said “You can edit your profile though”. I don’t give a rats-ass: I should be shown who will see my profile, and what data that will shown, before I can actually activate Buzz. Retrospective profile editing is a cop-out.
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[Google’s] don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.
Steve Jobs, speaking at an Apple Employee Town Hall Event -
Citing sources in the defense contracting and intelligence consulting community, the iDefense report unambiguously declares that the Chinese government was, in fact, behind the effort.
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Nexus One logo evolution (via suchosch)
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➶ Google phasing out Gears, phasing in HTML5
© Nik Fletcher 2010 ~ Contact
